Hello Manny, we don't have a solution for this, we have the same problem. With a doctype-system, which Xalan can't find, Xalan throws an exception. It doesn't validate the XML against the DTD, but it MUST find it. Until now we solved the problem with an empty DTD-file at the place, where the file is searched. If you found a solution or anybody knows one, we would appreciate to get to know it. Regards, Jo